The Project Physics Course, Then and Now⋆

Science & Education 12: 779–786, 2003. 779 © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. The Project Physics Course, Then and Now GERALD HOLTON Jefferson Physical Laboratory, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA I have been asked to speak today, as the program has it, on “The Project Physics Course, Then and Now.” I do so gladly, but must alert you that it is the story of a roller-coaster ride – up, down, and up again, as you will see. In its first few editions, Project Physics was a nation-wide physics course at the introductory level, chiefly for the 11th- and 12th-grade high-school student in the United States, but also used in some colleges. What the audience of this IHPST meeting may want to know most about is no doubt the way in which the design of the course, in addition to physical science itself, used the history and methodologies of science and the interaction of science and society. I will come to that shortly. But this will be better understood if I say first something about the history by which Project Physics came about, and even what its intended future is. Beginnings It all started very innocently, and as so often in life, with consequences one could not have foreseen. In 1962, a visitor came into my office at Harvard University’s Physics Department. I had not met him. The young man had an engaging person- ality, and introduced himself as a student, getting his doctorate at Harvard from the Graduate School of Education under Professor Fletcher Watson, who long before had been persuaded by President Conant to change from a professor of astronomy to professor of science education, so as to bolster the Education School in that department. My visitor was James Rutherford, on leave from his position as physics teacher and science supervisor at a high school in California. He came to me with a proposal. As a text for his physics class back home, he had been using my first textbook, titled Introduction to Concepts and Theories in Physical Science.What had attracted him to it was that it was not the usual, narrowly conceived text, but included other sciences, primarily astronomy and chemistry; that it used the history of science throughout, from the ancient Greeks and Copernicus to current nuclear physics; and that it also had some philosophy of science – three chapters on the structure and methods in physical science. In writing the book I had in mind that Invited Paper at the IHPST meeting, November 2001. 780 GERALD HOLTON in this one course a college student might take in physical science, one really must present not only good science, but also something solid on the way science is done and grows, on the scientific worldview, on how the sciences are interrelated with one another and with world history itself. At any rate, Rutherford’s proposal was that I should sit down and write a version of my book that would be more suited to the reading level of a typical high-school student. But I was of course otherwise occupied: there was my teaching load; running the research group in my high-pressure laboratory; and also publishing in the history of science. So I asked my visitor: “Why don’t you do it?” Well, eventually we agreed that he would try, and I would monitor it. A small grant from the Carnegie Corporation and one from the Sloan Foundation bought him time to do it. And that would have been the end of it. National Science Foundation But all this occurred not so long after the launching of Sputnik. Thus, in the follow- ing year I received an emergency call to come to the National Science Foundation in Washington, where I found myself among some thirty or so science-educators from all over the U.S. We were implored by the NSF officials to throw ourselves, individually or in groups, into the awesome task of designing, writing, testing, re- editing and finally publishing a national high-school physics course. One such had existed for years, the PSSC course designed under Jerrold Zacharias of MIT. But for various reasons, it had attracted only about 4% of the two and a half million senior students in high school, and the total fraction taking any physics course was under 20%, and relatively shrinking. This was ominous, since a physics course is advisable, at the very least, for future career decisions, not only in science but in medicine and other profes- sions, in policymaking at a time when about half the cases facing Congress or the courts or even ballot questions have a strong scientific/technical component. In chemistry, biology and mathematics, there had been published at least two such national courses for each. Physics so far had only one. At least one other course was needed. Therefore we were asked by the NSF officials there: who among us would come to the aid of the country? For, it was thought in those days, without more science-literate students the Russians might get us. Everyone at that meeting was sensible enough to say, “no.” Except one. And that’s how I became the principal investigator of what we first called Harvard Pro- ject Physics – later changed to the Project Physics Course (because we discovered that the word “Harvard” was thought to sound – I don’t know why – as too elitist in parts of the country distant from Harvard Square). I had agreed – chiefly because I saw the opportunity to have a humanistic, historically oriented course available for schools, one that would regard physics, as in my original text, not just as one damnded thing after another, but a coherent story of the result of the thoughts and work of living beings. (I have written some THE PROJECT PHYSICS COURSE, THEN AND NOW 781 articles on the philosophy behind the Project Physics Course; they are listed in the bibliography.) Jim Rutherford and Fletcher Watson were quickly persuaded to join me, to form a troika to run the thing. In fact that was an ideal combination – Jim, an excellent high school teacher; Fletcher, a top science educator who would take on, for example, the evaluation of the several pilot editions revised, year by year, for several years; and myself, to keep an eye on getting the physics and history of science right. Parenthetically, I should say that the National Science Foundation was not pleased when it woke up to the fact that the course wasn’t going to be only “pure” physics, and – horror upon horror – would be co-directed by a science teacher, even would eventually engage a large number of teachers in the revisions, tryouts and running institutes for teacher education. (It has long since changed its ways.) Textbook In the text we developed there is quite enough physics in the six main units of the book. But it includes much more, for example, special sections on the way advances in thermodynamics helped lead to the first industrial revolution; similarly, how Faraday’s “toys” helped in starting the second, electrical industrial revolution; and the effect of E = mc2 on the eventual building of nuclear reactors, weapons, and isotopes for medical research. The book was thoroughly illustrated, frequently from history of science docu- ments, starting with the crucial page in Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus, obtained directly from the University of Krakow library, and ending with the Medical Re- search Center at the Brookhaven accelerator. I thought it of greatest importance that the book’s accuracy and ambition should be reflected in the excellence of its design throughout. Therefore one of the first persons persuaded to join our project was the superb designer, Albert Gregory. Even a brief look at the index of the text would indicate the interconnections we tried to forge between physics, its neighboring sciences, its history, its cultural context, its effects. Another way to indicate the role of history and philosophy of science we embraced is by looking at the names of some of the 180 people whom we involved over the many years of development of the course and its components, not counting the teachers in dozens of trial schools (53 such schools the first time, over 100 the next year, and so forth, involving eventually a total of about 10,000 students in the tryouts of the revised editions). The Advisory Board included Erwin Hiebert of Harvard, Philip Morison of MIT, and Ernest Nagel and I. I. Rabi, both of Columbia University. Among the 120 people we persuaded to work with us at Harvard, some for one or more years, some more briefly, were persons some of whose names you might recognize and whose role you can safely guess: Arnold Arons, O. Theodore Benfey, Stephen G. Brush, Robert S. Cohen, Owen Gingerich, 782 GERALD HOLTON June Goodfield, Banesh Hoffmann, Edwin M. Purcell, John Rigden, Katherine Sopka, and Stephen Toulmin. Other Materials Writing just a good textbook would have been relatively easy. But in those affluent and ambitious days, when curriculum development could be funded, when schools could afford to buy, or were freely given by us, the materials, and when one could assume a greater attention span from students, publishing a text was not enough. Of course, we had to develop and provide also a rather elaborate student handbook and a fat instructor’s guide. So a varied and large – by today’s standards, an astounding – set of ancillary course components, including laboratory apparatus, had to be developed and tested by us as well, and suppliers had to be found who would make all of these materials available, so to speak at the push of a button, or as we would say in those days, by distributing a catalog similar to that of Sears Roebuck, from which to place the orders.

Load more